Review

The Light Between Oceans

Lighthouse keeper Tom (Michael Fassbender) and his wife, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), living off the coast of western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat in Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans.
Lighthouse keeper Tom (Michael Fassbender) and his wife, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), living off the coast of western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat in Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans.

In retrospect, I should have known that a film featuring a lighthouse sitting at the crux of two oceans as its central analogy would be rife with equally overstated symbolism, but even then, I wouldn't have been able to predict just how lumbering and obvious the rest of the production would be. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance, adapting a wildly popular novel from Aussie writer M.L. ­Stedman, relentlessly tries to push the film's tropes and metaphors into something bigger and more powerful than they need to be, which creates an atmosphere of melodrama that even a trio of strong performances can't banish.

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Septimus Potts (Bryan Brown) is a reluctant adoptive grandfather in The Light Between Oceans.

Cianfrance, who made the luminescent Blue Valentine back in 2010, and followed up that critical success with the turgid The Place Beyond the Pines two years later, has a penchant for hyperbolic analogy, but what's peculiar is that the genius of Valentine, a raw, cinema verite-like drama about the imploding of a young couple in a doomed relationship, worked so well precisely because it avoided such ham-handed histrionics. Here, he's working with a much less nuanced palette, content to splatter big splotches of color when a tiny brush stroke would have sufficed.

The Light Between Oceans

76 Cast: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Florence Clery, Jack Thompson, Thomas Unger, Jane Menelaus, Garry McDonald, Bryan Brown, Leon Ford

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and some sexual content

Running time: 132 minutes

Returning to windswept western Australia after serving a bloody tour of duty in the "Great War" (World War I), emotionally damaged Tom (Michael Fassbender) gratefully takes the lonely job of lighthouse caretaker on a small island off the coast and spends months at a time on his own.

Eventually, he meets and falls in love with Isabel (Alicia Vikander), the daughter of a prominent family in the coastal village for whom he works, and the two of them marry and live on the remote island, intending to have a large family. After two miscarriages, however, Isabel becomes increasingly miserable, a plight rectified after a rowboat mysteriously washes onto their shore, with a dead man and a living baby girl. Isabel persuades Tom to bury the body in order for them to keep the baby and tell the village she's their own. Reluctantly, Tom accedes to his wife's manic plan, only to regret it when he discovers a devastated mother (Rachel Weisz) back at the village who believes her husband and baby daughter to be lost at sea.

It's the kind of turn-of-the-century potboiler that follows decades of the lives of its protagonists with inept exposition and overt symbolic extravagances -- much of the emotional heft of the film is revealed in tearful voice-overs as Tom and Isabel write letters back and forth -- even as well-crafted as the mise-en-scene may be.

Cianfrance has chosen to shoot much of the film with natural light; Tom's initial stay on the island is lit largely by candles, a decision that seems to make perfect sense in theory, but here, as with many such artistic decisions, it merely comes across as hoary and stale. His camera, shifting between rigid stationary exteriors, hand-held dramatic surges, and extreme close-ups of his actor's concerned countenances, follows along in that achingly predictable manner. Most of his decisions sound fine in a vacuum -- one can imagine production meetings with everyone nodding their heads and writing exclamation points in their notebooks -- but on-screen, they too often come across as stilted and inert. For all its supposed naked emotionalism, the film feels achingly predictable, and worse yet, far more obvious to the audience than the characters, a situation that generally leads to antipathy.

The real shame is the way Cianfrance's heavy hand and the film's sluggish pace negate a lot of fine work by the actors. Fassbender and Vikander -- themselves a real-life couple after filming wrapped -- unsurprisingly share tender chemistry, and Vikander, in particular, has the film's only truly wrenching moments: Isabel struggling with the idea of having her adopted child taken out of her arms. There may be a place in cinema for such epic, sweepingly emotional tales (Scorsese's The Age of Innocence certainly comes to mind), but this film, with all the best intentions in the world, can't get out of its own way.

MovieStyle on 09/02/2016

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